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Cards Against Humanity buys Clickhole, turning it into an employee-owned company
- bearcobra 7y agoFingers crossed some of the other sites can be saved from G/O management
- ehsankia 7y ago> The Onion, which created Click Hole, will remain a part of G/O Media. It's a little strange. The Onion created Click Hole, but now click hole is safe but The Onion itself is still under G/O media. How did the employee split happen? Were they fully separate?
- forgotmypw 7y agoI think the big picture is that The Onion has reached peak brand value, and its most profitable exploitation mode is to gradually lower content expenditures while maximizing revenue through ad-plastering. I hope I'm wrong, but that's a general trend I've observed.
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoI got the feeling that The Onion had peaked and waned already a few years ago once they no longer produced steady video content. "Today Now", the coverage of the 2012 US presidential election and "Sex House" were brilliant, high-quality productions, but if the company couldn't keep it up that augurs badly for its business.
- plorg 7y agoMy goodness, I had completely forgotten about Sex House.
- ehsankia 7y agoJust this month they released a Podcast and it's pretty good.
- jml7c5 7y agoIndeed, I had been under the impression that ClickHole wasn't distinct from The Onion at all. I thought it was just a domain name they used for comedic effect, so that they didn't have to post under theonion.com/clickhole or something.
- vokep 7y agoThis, thought its just "The Onion, but Buzzfeed style instead of news site style"
- bibinou 7y ago> the deal will allow ClickHole to bring on additional staff — it currently has only five full-time employees
- hissworks 7y agoThey've been separate entities for years. The Onion under Univision became more of a digital production house. Editorial staff was always distinct. I presume that the handful of people leaving are writers, and they'll need to staff up around operations.
- wyxuan 7y agosurprised it went for only 1 mil
- donohoe 7y agoVery likely less then that.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y agoI’m not. Click hole is a funny concept. But it’s not that funny for that long. I love Alan Resnick, who sometimes contributes (or at least used to?). But even his click bait Dadaism grew stale. I’m surprised they have regular visitors. That being said, Cards Against Humanity is also pretty crap in my opinion. It’s mostly just shock value, which deteriorates greatly after the first session. It’s copy cat games are even worse (e.g. what do you meme?) as they tend to triple down on the shock value and the faux millennial sarcastic celebration of being a total loser... That’s not to say the game is necessarily bad for being mostly a one time thrill, but man do I hate it when people pull it out at a party
- bluedays 7y agoSo... Feel like I am asking the obvious here but is Cards Against Humanity also employee owned?
- criddell 7y agoNo.
- mcv 7y agoSo how can a company that's not employee-owned become employee-owned by getting bought by another company that's not employee-owned? The only way that makes sense is if Card Against Humanity was owned by the employees of Clickhole.
- hfdh434535 7y agoI'm a little unclear on the specifics too, even after reading the article. The article says "majority employee-owned company" So Cards Against Humanity still retains some ownership in it I presume. Here's one possibility: Maybe they bought ClickHole, and gifted over 50% of shares to the employees?
- criddell 7y agoJust a guess: Clickhole the company, owned by the employees, owes CAH $1M.
- Latty 7y agoCould also just be a philanthropic act for the media attention. CaH have done a lot of advertising through weird (mostly positive) means, it wouldn't surprise me if this was just another example.
- mattl 7y agoI thought so.
- cardosof 7y agoI've read the comments to this news and I must ask: what's the matter with G/O Media?
- cagenut 7y agothere are about a hundred layers to that onion short version: they're a pirate-ship/skeleton-crew management team sent in to do a "turnaround" (or flip) on the former gawker media by a private equity firm. the way a friend put it is that they adopted a rescue pit bull that has already bitten its last two owners and they started slapping it. absolutely breathtaking in terms of how they loaded the gun, carefully took aim at their foot, and pulled the trigger 3 - 5 times. you can point to any one fight they got in and think it seems like the staff are pushing their luck, but the pattern of over and over again proving mgmt had no idea what they bought and have no idea how to handle it just serves as a shining case study in what bullshit artists most of these "turnaround management consultant private equity" firms are.
- mortenjorck 7y agoTo anyone unfamiliar with G/O Media and Great Hill Partners, look up the phrase "Jim Spanfeller is a Herb." The story of Deadspin's extremely avoidable implosion is a debacle of private-equity mismanagement for the ages.
- plorg 7y agoSo, to be clear, it went something like: * The Onion existed and spun out AV Club and ClickHole, all were great for awhile but there senior staff began a mass exodus in 2012-2013. * The above were bought by Univision. I believe by this point most of their senior staff had departed. * Univision acquires Gawker Media in a fire sale and folds it and The Onion properties into Gizmodo Media Group. The Onion properties are migrated to Kinja, a move the Gizmodo project manager described as being about integrating e-commerce tools (chiefly Amazon referral links) into the site content.[1] At some point in this phase the last of the old timers left. * Great Hill Partners bought Gizmodo Media Group and turned it into G/O Media [1] https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2017/kinja-the-publishing-system-at-the-heart-of-gawker-lives-on-under-univision-update/ https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2017/kinja-the-publishing...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cb_123 7y agoHere's to you
- lwb 7y agoI am probably misunderstanding something here, but what's the point of buying a company without owning the whole thing? What are they actually "buying" here? I assume Temkin/CAH owns some significant portion of Clickhole so it's not 100% employee owned? Else why would they do it?
- Dylan16807 7y ago"ClickHole’s employees will become the majority owners of the site." Buying something to only own 40% (for example) is fine if the price is good, or you want to keep it safe.
- samstave 7y agoAfter rising from the dead, the media mogul, Hurst, saw what a joke his empire had become - vowing revenge - he has taken to amassing a portfolio of the worlds best parody news and entertainment properties he can get his rotting zombie mitts on. A source close to the matter was quoted as saying “Holy shit! The onion is finally in some real news!! The end is neigh!”
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tomnipotent 7y ago> I assume Temkin/CAH owns some significant portion of Clickhole Yes, 60% because they gave the other 40% to the existing employees. Considering it has 5 FT employees, that sounds like a pretty good deal and a great incentive to keep existing staff.
- vonmoltke 7y ago> Yes, 60% because they gave the other 40% to the existing employees. The article mentions no numbers, buy it does specifically say the current employees have a combined majority stake. Where did you get these numbers from?
- 7y ago
- WilliamEdward 7y agoMore employee owned companies please.
- sneak 7y agoReminder: Cards Against Humanity is racist, discriminatory garbage, dressed up as harmless good fun. Please avoid doing business with their company, if possible. More here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/magazine/letter-of-complaint-cards-against-humanity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/magazine/letter-of-compla...
- stevehawk 7y agoNo, it's a reminder that anything can be funny with the right context and we all take ourselves way too damn serious to enjoy life sometimes.
- sneak 7y agoEngaging in casual racism and reinforcement of harmful stereotypes without repercussions can indeed be riotous amounts of fun. I’ve played the game. I choose not to do so any longer, and I encourage you to reconsider as well. We can and should do better. There are lots of ways to have equal amounts of fun that don’t involve tons of reinforcement of harmful and backwards stereotypes. Our choices matter.
- blackearl 7y agoSome people have the maturity and wisdom to be able to enjoy dark humor. Whenever I hear someone so vehemently against jokes I assume they're covering something worse, like a bible-thumping politician who gets caught soliciting sex in a bathroom.
- sneak 7y agoDark humor and casual racism are not the same thing, and most attempts to cover up the latter using the former as a justification are poor attempts indeed. We are talking at cross purposes. I, too, enjoy dark humor. Cards Against Humanity is indeed dark. It is also other things, in addition to that. One of those things is racist.
- roland35 7y agoEmployee owned sounded good when I joined my last company, but there was one downside that led to it's demise! The founders were both in their 80s and their estate was going to sell their shares (plus a lot of early employees with many shares were retiring). Unfortunately the company could not get enough cash to buy the hundreds of millions needed for this - so the company was sold at a discount to a larger competitor.
- jawns 7y agoThis seems strange. Surely with the popularity of employee ownership (here's a list of some of the biggest employee-owned companies https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100 https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100 ) that aspect of it must have been figured out by now.
- roland35 7y agoThis specifically was an ESOP which as I understood it was more popular in the 1970s when the company was started. You are probably right, there could be improved corporate structures now!
- dragonwriter 7y agoI'm pretty sure labor coops, which don't have this problem, are much older than ESOPs (maybe a century older.)
- cptskippy 7y agoThat's something am employee owned company plans, yours did not.
- roland35 7y agoI'm surprised how quickly it fell apart too! I joined the company thinking it has had stable growth for decades. Certainly with the founders in their 80s this should not have been a surprise!